Game Over
by Frog-kun
Summary: There's always been something fragile about euthanasia. She doesn't realize it until it's her brother's plug she's pulling. Kirito, Suguha, and a world where two years is too long to wait. No OCs.


**A/N: **This story completely ignores the developments from the ALO arc onwards. Kirito and Suguha are not cousins and their relationship is purely platonic.

**Game Over**

_i._

The day he put on the Nerve Gear was the day he died. He left the world the same way he had lived in it – by escaping and slipping through unseen cracks, an exercise in both strikingly innovative pragmatism and utterly wasted potential. Suguha wonders if she has ever really known who her brother was.

His sleeping face is delicate, she knows that much. (How could she not?) There is not an ounce of masculinity in his soft, still baby-like face. He has never been chubby, though once upon a time his cheeks were full and she could have (_should have_) poked and tickled him there, until peals of laughter erupted from him like water from a burst dam. He had been ticklish when he was young. She wonders if he still is.

His gaunt, emaciated face is no longer fit to be poked or prodded. His hair has grown longer – it is like a girl's now, she thinks almost incredulously, as she traces her fingers through his stringy locks. Then again, any girl would have taken much better care of her hair than this.

His wrists are so thin. She can wrap her hand around it so that her fingers overlap her thumb. She cannot remember her brother's hands feeling like this. She remembers him having clever hands that moved about with an air of certainty, whether it was to hold a kendo blade or fix a computer or press buttons on a game. Whatever he did, he made sure to do well. Now his hands have withered away like the rest of his body, and when she tries to shake the life back into it, they simply fall limply down on the sheets whenever she finally lets go.

It is hard these days to imagine a time when her brother wasn't weak. He was weak even before he put the Nerve Gear on. In Suguha's opinion, he was weak the moment he quit kendo, but that is something Suguha can no longer bring herself to say.

_He's not actually dead, _the doctors tell her as she sits by his bed trembling and clutching at pale darkness through his lifeless, clammy hands. _He is simply in a coma._

A coma. The first thing Suguha learned about comas was how fatal they were without ever actually killing you.

_ii._

Suguha knows nothing about video games, but she does know this: Sword Art Online is a death game and nothing crueller could ever have been invented.

For whole months, nothing but SAO is on the news. The impact it has on the world could not have been overstated. A worldwide police investigation for Kayaba Akihiko bears no results – neither are the world's most experienced tech geniuses able to crack the game code and release the players from the game. Before her brother was interned, Suguha never read the newspapers. For a while, she read them every day, devouring every small morsel of detail that was relevant to her brother's situation.

When she realised that she never learned anything from them, she stopped reading them again.

But even now, her parents keep on reading. Their eyes flit across endless pages, squinting, trying to see through the text and into some unseen beyond. It does not take long before their faces become pale and withdrawn and their lips sag downwards because of the weight of their smiles. Suguha can see it in their eyes – bright with desperation that can never be sated, not as long as Kazuto goes on dreaming.

_iii._

It is shocking, really, how quickly Suguha's life comes to be defined by her brother's nonexistence.

"I didn't know you had a brother," her friends say when, three days after Kazuto put on the Nerve Gear, Suguha goes back to school.

Of course her friends wouldn't know about her brother. She never really talked about him. What would there have been to say, anyway? Kazuto has always lived in a different world from her, a world her friends understand no better than she does.

At school, Suguha notices the sideway glances people give her, as if they are not sure whether to comfort or question her. These days, even total strangers know her brother is in hospital. It seems there is not a person out there who doesn't know about the SAO incident.

Their questions do not hurt. Suguha tells herself this and continues her training. When people ask her, "What do you think's happening in the SAO world?" or "Did you hear the latest news about Kayaba?" Suguha just smiles wanly and says, "Onii-chan will pull through. I have faith in him."

At night, she takes their family photo down from her bedside table and she hugs it against her chest and cries, lets the salty tears touch naked air before wiping them away with a sniffle. To her, the tears are a caustic reminder of the regrets she doesn't think she'll ever be able to let go of.

_iv._

When Kazuto was in middle school, he quit kendo and started playing video games full time. He had always been a hardcore gamer, but in middle school he took it to new extremes. Suguha remembers all of this because the rift was slow and that was when she learned that the slowest rifts are the toughest bridges to cross.

As a child, Suguha watched him play sometimes – not the game, just him. In the days before VRMMORPGs, her brother clicked his way around computers and pressed buttons with such an innate sense of coordination it bordered on genius, but it was something Suguha never allowed herself to appreciate. She could only watch _him_. "Play with me, onii-chan," she would insist, touching him lightly on the back.

"Not now, Suguha." (He didn't call her 'Sugu' anymore.) "I can't save when I'm in a dungeon."

He always promised to log out when he could, but he never did. There was always something to do in an MMORPG, Suguha discovered, and she found she had no curiosity in finding out the details.

"Playing games is going to kill you one day," she told him, half-jokingly but also half-seriously.

At that time, Kazuto only laughed uneasily and glanced at her, his eyes flickering with an unspoken apology.

_v._

While Kazuto is gone, she masters the advanced footwork in kendo and wins more medals, piling them up one on top of the other – it is an assurance, somehow. This is what her brother could have been. This is what she has always _wanted _her brother to be.

It takes her months before her concentration can match up to her physical abilities. "You're distracted," her instructor tells her, and the unspoken assumption lingers in his eyes, long after Suguha finishes practice for the day. Suguha thinks of her brother and almost cries in the daytime – how can she live like this, trying to replace him? Just who is she trying to replace him for?

(Why can't he just come _back_? That would solve everyone's problems, wouldn't it?)

… Yet eventually, Suguha improves on her own accord, and she climbs higher than she knows Kazuto has ever been.

After she wins her first kendo tournament in Kazuto's absence, Suguha realises this – she has forgotten what her brother's voice sounds like.

_vi._

(At least she still remembers when her brother shared his things with her, when he made her ginger tea when she had a cold, how he taught her to ride a bicycle and helped her to her feet every time she slipped.)

_vii._

And before she quite knows it, two years have passed.

She has stopped having the nightmares every night, the one where the monsters come. She used to see them tear off her brother's limbs – take hold of them and twist and pull until _snap _and oozing blood that could not be staunched. Suguha wakes from the nightmares with her breath caught in her throat and her sheets twisted where she has thrashed about in her bed. _"I want to protect you, onii-chan!" _she screams within the boundaries of her mind, but desire is not enough to synchronise with her brother's deadened heartbeat.

She can't exactly remember when the nightmares stopped, but after two years, she knows they are not as frequent. In the first month after SAO was launched, a fifth of all total players died – her brother was not among the number. That first month must have been the worst, not just for her but for Kazuto too.

When the death numbers eventually fall to almost zero, so too does the media's interest in SAO. It begins to garner less attention, less funding, and not as many people ask Suguha about her brother these days.

Still. Her parents continue to smile their strained, lacklustre smiles, and Suguha knows within herself that the shadow has not yet passed. She doesn't know exactly when she got used to this kind of stalemate either. At first, she rose every morning expecting her brother to be either dead or awake – now, she doesn't know what to think. She prefers not to think at all.

"Suguha," her parents tell her one day, after she comes home from kendo practice worn and tired (_and satisfied, because she did not have to think about death or dying at all_). "There's something we have to tell you."

Suguha freezes. She thinks she understands this look on her parents' faces. It was the look they had when they first heard the news about the SAO incident and rushed into Kazuto's room, only to find a comatose boy crumpled on the floor.

"What is it?" she asks cautiously.

And her parents take a deep breath before they tell her.

_viii._

Suguha's first response is pained disbelief. It is as if the ceiling stretches out of proportion and all the comforting regularities in her life take a sudden 360 degree spin and she is left nowhere to stand. It is the start of the nightmare all over again.

"I can't believe the government would cut the subsidy," she says numbly because she doesn't know where this leaves them.

"Well, it has been two years," her mother says delicately. "The government has been funding the hospitals to keep the players alive, but they're running out of money and the hospitals are overcrowded as they are."

"It's only natural," her father agrees. "There's no guarantee that the players will ever wake up. It's been two years and they still haven't beaten the game. Just how long is it going to take?"

To be honest, Suguha has no idea just how her brother is faring inside the game, whether he is a strong player or not or if he stays in the safe zone. She likes to think her brother is one of the survivalists because even she, someone who is game illiterate, can notice skill when she sees it. Besides, she would hate to think of her brother as a coward even now. She is past that kind of sentiment, she thinks.

"We have to support onii-chan!"

"Suguha," her mother says, and it's that gentle tone of voice that makes Suguha's heart quaver and eventually break. "Suguha, we don't have the money."

"I'll get a part-time job!" Suguha declares. "I'll be a high school student soon! I'll be able to protect onii-chan! I just-!"

"Suguha."

Her parents slowly shake her head.

Suguha's expression of horror freezes on her face. Gradually, she can feel her face start to contort and crumple, until she is too far gone to turn back. Involuntarily, her knees buckle beneath her and she falls, falls, falls and sobs brokenly into her hands.

_ix._

"This is euthanasia, isn't it?" she says, hearing the tremble in her voice and seeing it in her fingertips.

There. For some reason, now that it has come to this, the word doesn't feel right. But then again, what _does _feel right? She has no heart to read up on the subject or to learn about the ethics behind it. What she does know is that her brother is alive and that one day he might come back, but she will never be able to face him.

The world has turned its back on the SAO victims – Suguha can only join them because she, too, is part of the living.

That is how her parents tell it to her as they prepare to make that final trip down to the hospital.

"You have to live your life to the fullest, Suguha. That's what your brother would have wanted."

Suguha is not stupid. She searched up the prices of hospital fees and noticed the obscene rise in the price. The hospitals are struggling – they cannot function without funds and the SAO incident caused nothing but a severe deficit for them for two long years. Suguha wonders how the doctors and nurses could have kept smiling at her, telling her words of comfort when their salaries were pushed to an all-time low. The families of the richer SAO players might be able to cover the costs but for everyone else, the plugs would have to be pulled and the Nerve Gears would have to be taken off.

Suguha starts reading the newspapers again. She knows hundreds of players have already died this way. Despair runs deep, and like a celestial body it eclipses all other emotion. It has already gained momentum and Suguha can only watch where it falls.

She discovers that her parents had in fact been paying to keep her brother alive for a long while after the funding was cut. They went through their entire savings account (money that would have gone to a trip to Okinawa to celebrate Suguha's graduation) and were paying on credit ever since. They are the ones who are keenly aware of their sacrifice. They have given so much and receive so little in return.

Suguha blames everyone. She blames her parents for not having enough money, the government for cutting the subsidies, the hospitals for not being able to manage, Kayaba for creating the death game, her brother for entering the game in the first place. But most of all, she blames herself because there is too much at wrong here and this is the only thing that feels right.

Up until then, she realises, a part of her was always still waiting for that final confirmation. Suguha does not lose hope because her brother still breathes and she listens to his pulse. There is always, _always _something to cling to.

It is only as her parents start the car that Suguha grabs hold of the only photo she has of the fourteen-year-old Kazuto and realises, oh so belatedly, that things will never be the same.

Kazuto turned sixteen today. He will never age another day.

_x._

It is game over, one month later.

.

The girl knocks on their door. She is a pale, thin stick of a girl – a clear victim of the SAO incident – but there is something somehow elegant about the way she stands and the tired smile on her gaunt face as she greets Suguha.

"Kirigaya Kazuto-kun's sister, right?" She smiles weakly and bows, looking as if she'll topple over any second.

Suguha immediately invites her inside. There are so many questions she wants to ask, but she starts with: "Are you sure you should be here? You seem like you should still be in hospital."

"Yeah," says the older girl with the weak chuckle. "Actually, I escaped. There's something I have to tell you."

She introduces herself as Yuuki Asuna, a former player of SAO and someone who had teamed up with Kazuto extensively in the past. She hesitates before she adds, "Actually, we were married."

Suguha is taken aback. For the first time, it hits her that after all this time her brother had been playing games he had somehow grown up and become a man without her ever realising it. Maybe it was even _because _of it. It is an idea that comes as both a shock and a relief.

"Was he good to you?" Suguha asks. As she speaks, she scrunches her eyes and tries to recall her brother's smile. There had never, ever been any malice in the brother she knew.

"Very," Asuna replies with a sad smile. "I saw no meaning in staying alive, but Kirito-kun – your brother – kept insisting I stay alive. As soon as he noticed all the players vanishing, one by one, he knew it would happen to him eventually. He told me I had to clear the game no matter what and to carry on a message to his family."

"You were the one who cleared the game?" Suguha peers closely at the sickly girl – Asuna looks so weak she could be blown over by the wind. She remembers that the conditions are different inside a game, but even so, it's hard to imagine.

That is, until she sees the sense of purpose flicker in Asuna's eyes as she responds. There is steel to this girl. "Yes. This may not make sense to you, but Kirito-kun had a certain ability and when he passed on, it was transferred to me. I defeated Heathcliff – Kayaba – and whoever was left in Aincrad returned to the real world." She looks down. The grief and melancholy in her eyes is palpable. "Sadly, the survivors are few. And I couldn't protect Kirito-kun to the end. I'm so sorry, Suguha-san."

Suguha cannot bring herself to respond to that. She thinks, _maybe at least onii-chan was happy in there_. She can't be sure. A wave of guilt and shame comes over her and she feels sick. For a moment, she forgets to breathe.

Finally, she asks, "What did onii-chan want to say?"

Asuna closes her eyes. When she speaks, Suguha imagines she hears the timbre of her brother's voice through her words. Finally, after what feels like years, she remembers what her brother's voice sounded like. It is a warm voice, she thinks, not entirely beautiful though not a single note of it is wrong.

"He said, 'I'm sorry, Sugu. I still want to watch you play kendo.'"

_Sugu_.

Suguha thinks of aeroplane rides on her brother's back, of making mountains out of molehills in the dirt in their backyard, of riding the bicycle together through the ephemeral summer heat. She thinks of a boy with soft eyes and a baby face who never got to say the words he truly meant.

She realises she has never told her brother that she loves him.

.

Even now, she still vividly remembers the day he put on the Nerve Gear. "Hey, onii-chan," she remembers calling out to him from behind the closed door of his bedroom. "After you're done playing that game, will you watch me at my next kendo tournament?"

For a moment, she thought he wouldn't respond – he hadn't heard her, as usual – but then he said, "Sure thing. I bet you've really improved."

Maybe it was just a false promise, but Suguha carved it into her heart. It was just a small thing but it would have to do for now. They could work on it. They had all the time in the world.

She laughed. "Just make sure you're not late for dinner!"

**fin**


End file.
